Orbit’s 2020 Journey – how are we doing?

Tuesday, 29 July 2014

Through our 2020 Vision we’re committed to our mission of Building Communities, and in April last year we committed to nine big targets which will help us to improve the social, economic and environmental prospects of people and communities.

By achieving our targets we will be able to help tackle the country’s housing crisis and deliver what our customers and communities need and want from us. To do this we are being innovative, looking at different ways of working and partnering with others to make things happen. To see what we’ve done so far this year please read on, and for our update on last year’s achievement you can view a video here.

Housing Choice

• Deliver 12,000 new homesTo 30 June we have delivered 132 new homes. This follows on from the 865 we delivered in 2013-14. By the end of this year we want to have delivered 2,200 homes across 2013-15 - that’s 1,335 this year in total.

• Provide a full range of home rental and ownership optionsWe are continuing to explore our options to develop private rented homes, so that by the end of this year we have a private rented scheme on site. • Provide a flexible housing ‘journey’ for customersSo far this year we’ve been looking at developing a product so that our customers can access a flexible housing journey.

Community Investment

• Provide 10,000 training and capacity building activities to support empowerment, opportunity and jobsLast year we provided 1,662 people with training and capacity building activities, and helped 155 achieve positive job outcomes, so we completely smashed our targets of 600 training activities and 100 employment outcomes. We are reviewing our targets for this year as we have already exceeded the 1,450 training places we were meant to achieve in 2013-14 and 2014-15 combined! And we only have a target of 235 for 2013-15 for employment outcomes – we know we will do far more than that!

• Deliver £30m of investment into communities, including external fundingWe invested £1.6m into community projects last year, with £315k more of finance and volunteer resource brought in to add to our delivery. Also, our Home Improvement Agencies did some excellent work in bringing in an additional £488k in grants and other funding to supplement the delivery of their work in the community. This year our target for community investment is £1.8 million and we’ve already got plenty of projects underway to meet that target. • Achieve a minimum energy rating of Band C in our homesWe’re concentrating currently on finalising ECO funding and then starting on site in a couple of our communities, putting in place energy efficiency measures to improve energy ratings and lower our customers’ bills.

Customer Offer

• Ensure 75% of customers contacts are onlineOn 11 June we launched our new website and have since been tracking how many of our customers are accessing our services online. We know that since launch an additional 2% of our customers have signed up for an online account, and with us introducing online payments and other exciting features soon, we are sure we will hit our target of 10% this year.

• Provide a range of tailored services which satisfy 90% of customersThis year we want to achieve 82% customer satisfaction, which means we are increasing our focus on performance and customer service, to make sure we are meeting the needs of our customers.

• Provide financial and energy efficiency advice to 20,000 peopleLast year 5,967 people received energy efficiency and financial advice (2,907 received energy advice, 3,060 received financial advice), either from directly employed Orbit staff, or from partners funded to deliver expert advice in our communities. This meant that we also smashed this target, which was to provide energy efficiency advice to 500 customers and financial advice to 1000 customers. Our targets for this year are 750 customers receiving energy efficiency advice and 1,250 financial advice, and we’re confident we’ll achieve both.